Slat Wall Part 2: Measuring and Building

The implementation of the slat wall was rather scary. Wood is expensive (nice wood gets priced by the foot) and because it is expensive (and we do not have a storage warehouse handy in our house) we bought only 20% more than we thought was necessary. Which meant that making a lot of mistakes could result in running out of wood. Which came from a specialty lumber yard, so we could not just pick up more from Home Depot.

Also the ceiling of the living room is one of the (few) areas in the house that we have not painted. So mistakes in installation that damage the ceiling (paint) would cause even more downstream costs and disruption. Fun.

The design is quite simple. Board on top, with dados (channels) cut through. Matching board on bottom with dados. Attach vertical boards in the channels and voila! Easy, right?

The dados were cut by our CNC machine. Since "0.75 inches" in the computer is not necessarily 0.75 in reality, the first spacer boards were cut in the same pine we prototyped the wall in. It took a few iterations to get the width correct. 

This gave us another chance to check out the 2:1 spacing with the actual boards. It seemed OK, so we proceeded by cutting the spacers for real.

Now that we were close to the real installation, we had another problem: finding a ceiling joist. Ideally we wanted the slat wall to be anchored into a structural part of the house. But this part of the house is extra fun because the walls and ceiling are plaster. With metal mesh in the plaster. So the technique of using a magnet to find drywall screws is useless. In fact a magnet sticks to most of the ceiling. A stud finder does not find anything either. Since we wanted the slat wall as close to the door as possible that also limited the placement. We...never found the joist. Instead we used drywall anchors and cut the vertical boards as close to flush as we could manage to provide a little bit of tension.

Here we go--point of no return!

The first board, on the ceiling, aligned using fancy lasers:

You can see how most of the boards are the perfect height. Clamps and scrap wood were around to keep the boards from falling out.

As we installed each vertical board, sometimes we had to fit them  into different slots than the one we intended (as being off by a mm was noticeable). But since the living room height dropped between the front door and the rest of the room (yay old houses...), cutting a board too short just meant we used it closer the dining room.

The cross line laser level was crucial to getting the slat wall plumb. Especially as the room is very not plumb. In fact the height from one end to the other...is not the same (which is why we never even considered building it as one unit in the garage and moving it in). These two pictures are about a couple of feet apart (2421 vs. 2427 mm). Each vertical board had to be custom-cut to match.

We decided to place the slat wall in between the switch plate and window as putting it to the left of the switch plate would take up a lot of valuable living room space. You can see how the slat wall is not in alignment with the vertical window trim. Because of the laser we know the slat wall is perfectly straight.

Once we got the first pair of ceiling and floor spacers installed, the slats went up at a fairly quick pace.

The last detail was figuring out how to trim around the ceiling and floor spacers. We could not leave it un-trimmed as the boards are just held in by tension (or not at all if they were a little short).  

It would have been easiest to use a "fat trim." Also the most secure. But this would create a major issue with upkeep as dust, pet hair, etc. would accumulate in the bottom and be really hard to clean out. 

So we did the fiddly thing and ripped boards (meaning sheered off some of the width instead of using the whole 3" board) to match the thickness of the ceiling and floor spacers. It was surprisingly difficult to get the trim attached. D used a nail gun to hold the trim up and the wood was so dense (or his technique so poor) that the nails frequently failed to go all the way through the board and he had to hand nail them flush. Plus there was a bit of waviness and the trim wasn't 100% even with the boards. One major fun part of working in wood is that you cannot just slap some caulk and paint in to cover imperfections. Still, we ended up with lovely mitered corners and top and bottom trim at the same height as the spacers (meaning an even plane to dust, rather than something with a dust-catching well):

Then it was onto the next major phase - installing hooks! But that's a story for next time.

Slat Wall Part 1: Prep Work

I think we're at an all-time low for our "before" picture--I had to get a couple screen grabs from an old video for photographic evidence of the way this part of the living room has looked for literally over a decade: piano, torchiere floor lamp, messy coat rack:

For years D has wanted to get the piano off of that wall. It is the "entryway" and really seemed like a bad place for the piano, not to mention the fact that it was right up against our baseboard heating, which was bad both for the piano and for allowing the heat to get into the house. Plus we really needed more storage.  Creating some kind of wall would help us be able to get rid of that tippy, cluttered coat rack without losing all the coat storage. We had an IKEA Expedit behind the sofa (see this older picture, used a few times already including here):

But this only gave us a few cubbies, especially because we deliberately left some cubes open to avoid making the entry way too dark.

We debated a few options:

1. Pony wall (waist high free standing drywall)
2. Different furniture
1. More and bigger IKEA Expedit (now called Kallax)
2. IKEA Pax
3. Vitsoe 606
3. Slat wall

The pony wall was dropped fairly quickly as they are fairly deep (since you need 2x4 + drywall) and not very functional. The more/bigger Expedit / Kallax was dropped as it doesn't allow for hanging clothes. Pax (wardrobe) would create a fairly deep literal wall and would take away a lot of space and light. The Vitsoe 606 is quite expensive (though they seem to hold 100% of their value) and we thought it could give more of a "did we just enter a SoHo clothing store" vibe? 

That left a slat wall, which had the advantages of taking very little space, allowing for light to filter, and giving some flexibility on how / where to hang coats. The major disadvantage being that it would need to be custom-built. 

But before really starting several important questions needed to be answered: dimensions of the wood, the spacing of the slats, and what kind of wood. First, D did a lot of measuring and then some mock-ups with cheap pine, mostly to convince himself (and me) that it was not crazy. Here's the entry view with the initial framing (all press fit, i.e. just held in place with friction) in place for what the space was potentially going to become. 

With the project given the green light (by me), the piano found its new home in the sun room, which really is a much better home for it:

Then we moved our Expedit against the now-empty piano wall (and, cats being cats, this guy had to inspect the area fist):

And now, with the space behind the love seat empty, the project could begin. D continued to use the pine boards for more testing and measuring. We tried a few different variations for the spacing of the boards to get a sense of what we liked. We ended up deciding on roughly a 2:1 opening-to-slat ratio.

D also worked with a few lumber yards and settled on a couple options to consider for our final product. He ordered samples of sapele ("African") mahogany (bottom, the redder/warmer one) and American walnut (top) to see what matched our existing furniture and space:

Hopefully you can see in addition to comparing the wood color itself, we tested how it would look stained/oiled. The left/lower side of each board shows each wood with Danish Oil on it, and the right/upper part shows it completely bare.

We decided on the warmer, redder sapele as the existing cabinets in the kitchen and living room had some of those hues. We ordered quarter-sawn S4S (finished on all sides) 1x6 boards. We paid them to rip most of the 1x6 boards in half to create 1x3 as doing it ourselves would have been annoying. 

And just like that, we were ready to begin...